Norfolk House 3; the Back Story

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Beth said I was teasing, in my post Norfolk House (2). It’s so long since these memoirs were interrupted (since early September) that I ought to tell you The Story So Far. I have a head-cold today, but let us give it true dignity and call it man-flu. A woman would just get on with it, but a man needs universal sympathy, cosseting, bed-rest, the cooing of “You poor baby!” in his ear and attentive room service, especially the medicinal hot lemon and rum. Provided with all these things, he can struggle on bravely, without too much in the way of delirium.

Now to the story so far. My mother at the age of 21 left the confines of her parents’ house in St Leonards-on-Sea to seek her fortune as an adventuress in the Far East. Influenced by Isadora Duncan, who had died in a freak accident 4 years before (strangled when her flowing scarf got caught in the wheels of her Bugatti), she (my mother) had accompanied her dancing teacher Miss Holdsworth. They had taught Greek dancing to the small children of Chinese millionaires and ballroom dancing to the millionaires themselves.

In 1935 she married a tall moody Dutchman, Jan Jacobus, in a society wedding at Singapore Cathedral. She gave up the dance-teacher thing: husband was jealous and wanted to keep an eye on her. So as a team, they managed the fashionable Gap Roadhouse and a branch of Ciro’s Pearls. But the war loomed. Jan Jacobus was caught up in secret activities which gave him advance warning of the Japanese invasion and she evacuated well before time to Perth, Western Australia.

She met a sweet boy ten years her junior. He was 17 and living with Mum and Dad. She took riding lessons from him. I only can tell you what I have gleaned from different sources. Horses were doubtless involved in their relationship, but in any case I was the result. She didn’t tell me: I found out fifty years later. Her toy-boy (my father) went to fight the war and she brought me up in a lodging-house exclusive to women, though gentlemen were sometimes glimpsed in the morning. Some months after the Japanese surrender, my father returned, washed-out with hardships and malaria. On learning that the hostilities had made her a widow, he instantly did the gallant thing and offered marriage; but her fresh-faced country boy had morphed into a half-starved war-weary soldier .

Perth was a dead-end in the middle of nowhere; her glory-days of the Thirties—glamour, social whirl, status, property, income—were all smashed by the ravages of war. St Leonards-on-Sea, where nothing ever happens, which she had fled as soon as she legally could, now seemed a haven of comfort, even if it meant going back to live with the parents she’d fled sixteen years previously for adventure in the Far East.

In June ’46 we departed on the rmv Rangitata from Fremantle to Tilbury, a six-week adventure that took me away from the place I knew and loved. To me, aged 4, it wasn’t a finite transit but an endless new way of life. I was used to multiple mothers at the lodging-house but on the ship I had 800 doting mothers. My own mother was lacking in the maternal instinct so she let me wander from deck to deck on my own, everywhere petted by other women.

My arrival in England was a shock, for my grandparents were horribly strict. They made me speak “properly”, reprimanding me for sounding like an Australian child and emulating their table-manners. My mother became restless almost immediately. She must find a rich eligible man, but St Leonards was hardly the place. It was overstuffed with widows and spinsters left high and dry from the Great War of 1914-18. So she dropped me off at Jan Jacobus’ sister’s place in Holland, on the phoney basis that I was a nephew; then proceeded to Switzerland where she hung out in hotels till her money ran out. Fortunately she didn’t strike lucky, else I might have had a Nazi stepfather on the run from the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal. So she collected me on the way home and we returned to my grandparents’ house. (I never lived anywhere long, till my late forties!)

She met a man David Wheeler, who lived locally, and married in January 1948 before my half-sister was born. He’d been a bachelor till his late fifties and his eccentric habits included nudism. Accordingly, each summer we went to the Isle of Wight to stay at Woodside, an overgrown naturist holiday-camp run by an anarchistic old clergyman. For the rest, I was sent to a boarding-school.

After my mother left David she thought Woodside might be a good place to pick up a new husband. You could inspect the wares before committing yourself, I suppose. That’s how she met Sep. So let me now tell you his story.

Blackett (his real middle name) was a Tynesider with a slightly Geordie accent who’d run away to sea as a boy and by dint of fearful study had passed exams as a ship’s third engineer in the Merchant Navy. Then he’d married E (he always called her that, after she became his ex, but her real name was Edith) and it was time to settle down as a landlubber when the children were born. So he got a job on the Isle of Wight at the aircraft factory Saunders-Roe, who in the early fifties were still building the Princess Flying Boat, the biggest of its kind, a luxury way to travel fast when the great ships Mauretania, Queen Mary, United States, still dominated the trans-Atlantic traffic: we used to watch them with binoculars from the lawn at Woodside, as they paraded slowly down the Solent from Southampton.

To supplement their income, Blackett and E used to run a lodging house for visitors to the company: engineering students, sales reps and the like. For this purpose the company let them a tall building, Powys House. E ran off with one of the lodgers called Satterthwaite (the name sticks in my mind), taking their children to New Zealand. He never saw them again, not a letter or card, but struggled on with the guest-house on his own. Under his sole management, it was more like a self-service hostel. At weekends he would escape the chores and bicycle to Woodside, where he could enjoy the company of naked ladies on a day-ticket. And so he met my mother and they consoled themselves till their divorces came through and that is how I moved to York House in East Cowes.

My mother had no intention of replacing E as a drudging landlady, serving up greasy breakfasts to engineers in a hurry. So they engaged a crusty old steward, Warrant Officer James Watling, ex-RN, ex-Havant Flying Club, to be their chef and factotum. He wasn’t keen on being a factotum: he hung around in the kitchen all day with his white chef’s uniform, cigarettes, indigestion mixture and vacant contemplation. I’d go there after school, hungry for a snack, and watch the ash fall off his cigarette as he spun his sailor’s yarns and grumbled about how things were not as they used to be.

Then Saunders-Roe said they needed to repossess York House to convert to office space. We had to move on. Normal people would have bought a little house all to themselves, something I had never known. My mother had never known it either, for her grandparents’ house was big and after the days of servants they had let out rooms to tenants. Out East, her household would have included Chinese “boys” and Malay syces (chauffeurs). I suspect Blackett had forgotten a cosy little home too for he’d spent years at sea. Anyhow we still had “Wattie” our adopted chef and my mother called him a treasure, though his cooking was plain and overcooked. So we (they: I was 13 and had no say in the matter) rented Norfolk House to maintain the fantasy of running a hotel. It only lasted a few months because we were never able to fill that big house. Blackett refused to advertise because then, he said, someone would report us to the municipal authority for not paying property tax at the business rate. It has always seemed odd to me, but I think he had enemies at work.

We didn’t stay there long but the memories are so rich I could write a book about those few months.

Now, where is that rum and lemon?